Here’s a terrible TV-movie-style piece of work with some awful acting and a deeply questionable, crass finale; it’s all the more wince-inducing given the lineup of alpha talent behind it. Catherine Hardwicke is the director of the powerful Thirteen, the first and best Twilight, and the tender Miss You Already (2015); her lead actor here is none other than Brian Cox, whose star could hardly be more starrily in the ascendant after his stunning performance as Murdochian media plutocrat Logan Roy in HBO’s Succession. There is also the estimable Kate Beckinsale. But there is only so much they can do with this material.
Cox plays Max, an ageing tough guy in jail, given compassionate leave after a terminal cancer diagnosis to spend his remaining months with long-suffering daughter Maxine (Beckinsale). She is a hardworking single mum living in the featureless suburban district around Las Vegas with her teenage son Ezra (Christopher Convery), who is being bullied at school on account of his epileptic seizures. Maxine still resents her grizzled dad for putting crime above family, but the old guy wants to make things right and – like the fierce ex-boxer that he is – shows Ezra how to deal with the bullies. (Train in the gym and beat them up turns out to be the answer to this one.)
It’s pretty moderate stuff, but the movie falls flat on its face with Ezra’s absent dad: a junkie loser and punk musician (played by Tyson Ritter) who evidently deserves zero compassion or redemption and whose scenes are almost unwatchably hammy and embarrassing. Cox lends the movie some weight, but is nonetheless landed with a dodgy and preposterous sacrificial ending in which he apparently goads and entraps someone into a serious crime. One for Hardwicke, and everyone else, to forget.
• Prisoner’s Daughter is released on 4 July on Prime Video.
